Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Venture

In a sweeping history of the Hawaiian kingdom's rise and fall, Julia Flynn Siler weaves together portraits of royals, sugar barons, and missionaries to tell the story of one of the most breathtaking land grabs of the Gilded Age.

The descendants of the first intrepid Polynesian navigators to Hawaii lived on the islands in almost complete isolation for centuries, until Captain Cook's arrival in 1778. Over the next century, a group known as the "Sugar Kings" gained control of much of the volcan...